E 
340 




Daniel WithBttv 

Ch€ Orator 




Class ___^ 54 

Book, _.^4_?ja 
Copyright N" 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 






From ALBERT E. PILLSBURY, 

BOSTON. 



Daniel CClebetcr 

Cbc Orator 



Hn Hddreee delivered before the Brooklyn Institute 

of Hrts and Sciences and the New Sngland 

Society of Brooklyn 

By Hlbert 6. pillebury 



THE Library of 

CONGRESS, 
Two Copies Received 

J%Pft 15 1903 

CLASS 'a. W(c, No 



Copyright, 1903 

BY 

Albert E. Pillsburv 



£1340 



i\ 



Daniel Webster, the Orator, 



In one of his most famous speeches, Webster paid this 
eloquent tribute to Samuel Dexter, in which the speaker 
stands unconsciously revealed : — 

" He was a lawyer, and he was also a statesman. He 
had studied the constitution that he might defend it. He 
had examined its principles that he might maintain them. 
More than all men, or at least as much as any man, he was 
attached to the general government and to the union of the 
states. His feelings and opinions all ran in that direction. 
A question of constitutional law was, of all subjects, that one 
which was best suited to his talents and learning. Aloof from 
technicalities and unfettered by artificial rules, such a question 
gave opportunity for that deep and clear analysis, that mighty 
grasp of principle, which so much distinguished his higher 
efforts. His very statement was argument. His inference 
seemed demonstration. The earnestness of his own convic- 
tion wrought conviction in others. One was convinced and 
believed and assented because it was gratifying, delightful, to 
think, to feel and believe, in unison with an intellect of such 
evident superiority." 

It is Webster himself, the orator, lawyer, and statesman, 
who is here painted by his own hand in a portrait for which 
Dexter sat, but of which none but Webster could fill the 
outlines. We are to look at Webster the orator. It is the 
most attractive if not the most important character in which 
he appeared. Webster's greatest power was the power of 



speech. As an orator he won his highest triumphs, and as 
an orator he will be longest remembered. His pre-eminence 
as a lawyer and statesman was largely due to his surpassing 
powers of clear, eloquent, and convincing statement. There 
were other lawyers of his time who had more learning of the 
books, and a few who were quite his equals in comprehensive 
grasp of legal principles. There were statesmen who had 
more qualities ot leadership, more organizing and constructive 
power, more depth and permanence of conviction. As a 
consummate master of speech, Webster is without a rival in 
our history, it he has a superior in the history of eloquence. 

Haifa century has now passed since Webster's death, and 
threescore and ten years since he reached the summit of his 
powers. The atmosphere is cleared of the incense of praise 
and the mists ot detraction which rose about him in his own 
time. His contemporaries have disappeared, and the mem- 
ory of the greatest ot them is fading. Historic events have 
intervened, of the utmost importance, almost transforming the 
character of the government. Another generation of states- 
men has appeared, done its work, and passed awav. That 
Webster is still among the first in interest of all our great 
characters is striking evidence of the permanent hold which he 
took upon his countrymen. The great political changes 
which have befallen since his day, so far from obliterating his 
memory, have helped to preserve it ; for in every one of them 
his influence was felt and his authority invoked, as it is in- 
voked to-day, even by those who would pervert it. The new 
procession of historic figures which has passed across the 
national stage has hardly crowded him from the central place. 
The reason is not far to seek. Webster stamped himself in- 
delibly upon the American mind. To an extent of which we 
are not always conscious, he wove himself into the very fabric 
of the government. His word directed the course of the 
public thought on national topics. His great speeches be- 



came part of our history, our literature, our constitutional 
law, almost of our national existence. 

Webster was a product of nature. The schools and soci- 
ety added little to him. The unpeopled wilderness in which 
he was born and grew up permeated his character and was 
reflected in his mind. His native spot was on the frontier 
of the New Hampshire settlements, where his earliest associa- 
tions were among trackless forests, rivers, lakes, and moun- 
tains, the vast sublimity of primitive nature. He was a delicate 
child, with a large head, coal-black hair, great black eyes, 
which none who saw them ever forgot, and a complexion so 
swarthy that they called him "little black Dan." In some 
notes of his life he says, " Two things I did dearly love, — 
reading and playing." Being much fonder of these than of 
hard work, he was of little use on the farm. An elder 
brother facetiously said that Dan was sent to school " to 
make him equal to the other boys." In truth, however, 
physical weakness and intellectual promise together devoted 
him to an education which his parents could ill afford to 
bestow, with results that greatly repaid the sacrifice. 

His mind was attuned in childhood to the dominant note 
of his life. Webster's character centred in devotion to the 
Union, — a devotion amounting to passion. Born in Janu- 
ary, 1782, he was in his seventh year when the Federal con- 
stitution was before the people for adoption. It was the 
theme of all tongues. Webster's father, a man of marked 
character, a captain in the French war and in the Revolution, 
personally known and trusted by Washington, and of rank 
and influence among his neighbors, was an ardent advocate of 
the constitution and a member of the New Hampshire con- 
vention which made its ratification complete. The household 
and neighborhood talk about the constitution was among 
little Dan's earliest recollections. One of his first posses- 
sions was a cotton handkerchief on which the instrument was 



printed at large, where he first read it ; and as he told this 
story, he used to add, " I have known more or less about 
it ever since." These things became part of the substance 
of his mind. But the orator was not yet born. As a boy, 
he could not speak before the school. " Many a piece," 
he says, " did I commit to memory, and recite and rehearse 
in my own room over and over again ; yet, when the day 
came, when the school collected to hear declamations, when 
my name was called, and I saw all eyes turned to my seat, I 
could not raise myself from it. When the occasion was over, 
I went home and wept bitter tears of mortification." 

It was not until his college days that he discovered his 
powers of speech. Once awake, they developed so rapidly 
that before he left Dartmouth his reputation was established 
as the best speaker in the college. The earliest of his pro- 
ductions remaining is a Fourth of July oration ot 1800. He 
began, as most young men do, by copying the worst faults 
of his contemporaries; and these youthful excursions are 
interesting chiefly for the contrast between their stilted and 
artificial rhetoric and the simplicity, directness, and force with 
which he spoke only a few years later, when his own genius 
had begun to assert itself In the speech of 1800, Columbia 
appears " In the forum of the nations, and the empires of the 
world are amazed at the bright effulgence of her glory." 
Washington is a character who " never groaned but when fair 
Freedom bled." On a similar occasion in 1802, he pictures 
America before the Revolution as confronted with " the 
frightful form of Despotism, clad in iron robes, reclined on 
a heap of ruins; in his left hand taxation — his right grasped 
the thunders." This is bad enough, but the courts and 
senates of that day were full of such bombast, and the 
common people heard it eagerly. Already the constitution 
is his theme. The sentiments are Webster's own, and are 
remarkably just and manly for a lad hardly out of his teens. 



The style, which is borrowed, gives but little promise that 
the speaker would live to produce oratory worthy to be com- 
pared with the greatest examples of any age. 

In college, Webster was more distinguished for general 
reading and information than for scholarship. The best of 
his training was derived from the discipline of his nine years 
at the Portsmouth bar. In that period he developed a severe 
and unerring taste that rejected from his style of speech the 
faults of the contemporary school, and prepared him to create 
a school of his own. In this he was much aided by the 
chastening influence of Jeremiah Mason, his constant antag- 
onist, a man who rarely uttered an inapt or superfluous word. 
Webster richly repaid this service. His encomiums have 
rescued Mason from the oblivion that awaits all mere lawyers, 
however eminent in their day and generation. 

Webster's public life began at a critical time in the affairs 
of the country. The constitution, " extorted," as John 
Quincy Adams said, " from the grinding necessity of a reluc- 
tant people," had already begun to chafe. The doubts and 
misgivings with which the people had created a Federal gov- 
ernment armed with real powers, had soon developed into 
open discontent. As early as 1798 the ill-advised alien and 
sedition laws brought out the first direct menace against the 
perpetuity of the Union. Before the echo of the Virginia 
and Kentucky resolutions died away, the embargoes and 
the war of 18 12 swept American commerce from the seas 
and forced the maritime states into an attitude of hostility to 
the administration, if not to the government itself, which cul- 
minated in the Hartford convention. In the midst of these 
excitements, Webster made his first entry upon the public 
stage, as a representative in Congress from his native state of 
New Hampshire. The very beginning of his public service 
gave evidence that a new man and a new orator had 
appeared. 



Webster's sympathies were naturally with his neighbors 
and constituents. He declared the war "an instance of in- 
conceivable folly and desperation," and did not hesitate to 
denounce the imbecile policy which sought to protect our 
commerce abroad by destroying it at home. In this situa- 
tion, at the threshold of his public career, his mettle was put 
to proof. The war-party in Congress undertook to rebuke 
him for his hostility to the measures of the administration. 
We have seen such discipline meekly accepted in our own 
time, but Webster was not a good subject tor it. He turned 
upon his assailants with this ringing note of defiance : — 

" The more 1 perceive a disposition to check the freedom 
of inquiry by extravagant and unconstitutional pretences, the 
firmer shall be the tone in which I shall assert and the freer 
the manner in which I shall exercise it. It is the ancient 
and undoubted prerogative of this people to canvass public 
measures and the merits of public men. It is a 'home-bred 
right,' a fireside privilege. It has ever been enjoyed in every 
house, cottage, and cabin in the nation. It is not to be drawn 
into controversy. It is as undoubted as the right of breath- 
ing the air or walking on the earth. Belonging to private 
life as a right, it belongs to public life as a duty ; and it is the 
last duty which those whose representative I am shall find 
me to abandon. Aiming at all times to be courteous and 
temperate in its use, except when the right itself shall be 
questioned, I shall then carry it to its extent. I shall then 
place myself upon the extreme boundary of my right, and bid 
defiance to any arm that would move me from my ground. 
This high constitutional privilege I shall defend and exercise 
within this House and without this House, and in all places, 
in time of war, in time of peace, and at all times." 

The spirited vindication of the right of free speech, of 
which these words are part, unsurpassed in the literature of 
the race with which free speech had its birth, was Webster's 
first real service to his country. It deserves to be repro- 



duced and remembered whenever and wherever the " right 
preservative of all rights" is invaded or drawn in question. 

In I 8 18, when Webster was but thirty-six years of age, the 
famous case of Dartmouth College brought him prominently 
before the country as a forensic orator of the first rank. His 
earliest legal argument of national repute showed him to be 
unrivalled in the power of clear, forcible, and convincing 
statement in that field. Apart from our constitutional 
system, of which he was the great master, Webster was 
never distinguished as a profound or original thinker in the 
law. He was made for greater things. The legal theory 
that under the Federal constitution a legislative charter is 
a contract, beyond impairment by the state, — a conception 
so bold and original that it struck lawyers and judges with 
surprise and distrust, — is ascribed to Smith and Mason, 
Webster's associates before the New Hampshire court, where 
it was overruled. It fell to Webster to take up the dis- 
credited argument, and press it home to conviction upon the 
national tribunal. In his hands a legal abstraction took on 
life, and bore down upon a hostile court with irresistible 
force. The published report, a web of legal reasoning of the 
closest texture, with hardly a thread of color, does not in- 
clude the famous peroration. When Webster had appar- 
ently finished, he paused for a moment ; and then, as if by 
afterthought, reminding the court that its judgment might 
destroy the feeble institution in whose behalf he spoke, 
he said, " It is, sir, as I have said, a small college — and yet 
there are those who love it." Here his voice broke, and his 
eyes filled with tears. Recovering his composure, after a 
moment of breathless silence he proceeded, in a deep and 
thrilling tone that went to the heart of his audience, " Sir, 
I know not how others may feel ; but for myself, when I see 
my alma mater surrounded, like Caesar in the senate-house, 
by those who are reiterating stab after stab, I would not tor 



this right hand have her turn to me, and say, Et tu quoque, mi 
fill ! — and thou, too, my son ! " 

The Dartmouth College argument was a great triumph of 
forensic speech, and marked an epoch in judicial advocacy. 
It carried an unwilling court to the support of a doubtful 
principle, and at once gave Webster the place that Pinkney 
had held at the head of the American bar. 

We next see Webster winning fresh laurels in a new and 
different field. At the celebration at Plymouth, in 1820, of 
the two-hundredth anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, 
he pronounced an oration which at once took rank as the 
greatest of its kind in American history, — a rank which it has 
held against all efforts but his own. It is especially distin- 
guished by a noble passage in denunciation of the slave-trade, 
in which the generous instincts of this native son of liberty 
broke out in a burst of impassioned invective, delivered, as 
Mr. Ticknor said, " with a power of indignation which I 
never witnessed on any other occasion. He seemed like the 
mountain that might not be touched, and that burned with 
fire." More familiar is the famous apostrophe, declaimed by 
every school-boy, " Advance, then, ye future generations," 
spoken, according to the same hearer, " with a smile of most 
attractive sweetness, and arms extended, as though he would 
embrace them." 

The Plymouth oration first displayed Webster's genius 
for the highest expression of reason and patriotism on great 
public occasions. The profound impression which it made 
upon the country was not alone due to its beauty of style or 
elevation of tone. His real theme was the origin and destiny 
of the American nation. It was here that Webster began his 
great work of creating a national spirit among the people of 
the states, — a work never laid down but with his life. 

This oration left Webster without a rival in the field of 
occasional oratory. When the corner-stone of the monument 



was to be laid at Bunker Hill, in 1825, on the fiftieth anni- 
versary of the battle, all eyes turned to him as the spokesman 
of the occasion. It was an international event. The presence 
of Lafayette, and of the survivors of the battle, gave to the 
celebration a peculiar and solemn interest. It was as though 
the scroll of time had been unrolled, and the people com- 
muned with the fathers face to face. The great opportunity 
was greatly availed of Webster pronounced a splendid ora- 
tion before a vast throng of people, all of whom, it is said, 
were able to hear him. He was audible at a great distance, 
without apparent effort, in virtue of the carrying quality of 
his voice, not naturally deep but a resonant baritone, flexible 
and of great compass. An incident of the occasion illustrates 
his command over men. In the midst of the oration the 
platform from which he spoke gave way, and the crowd began 
to break in panic. "It is impossible to restore order," said 
one of the managers. " Nothing is impossible, sir," rejoined 
Webster ; and then, raising his hand with his most imperial 
air, " Let there be order, at once" — and in a moment the 
multitude was quiet. 

The Bunker Hill oration was largely composed, as Web- 
ster afterward admitted, while he was fishing for trout in 
Mashpee brook. Standing middle-deep in the water, paying 
no attention to his rod and line, the oblivious angler was 
heard by a companion to burst out with the famous apos- 
trophe, — " Venerable men, you have come down to us from 
a former generation." The companion was his son Fletcher, 
and there are many jocose allusions to this incident in their 
correspondence. 

A year later Webster crowned his fame as an occasional 
orator with the eulogy on Adams and Jefferson. The death 
of these two illustrious Americans, the last survivors of the 
great men of the Revolution, almost at the same hour of the 
same day, and that day the fiftieth anniversary of the great 



10 



event with which their names are forever bound up, aroused 
the popular emotion to a degree unparalleled since the death 
of Washington. The eulogy was spoken in Faneuil Hall, 
shrouded for the first time in mourning. The eager crowd 
that surged about the building broke down a door and 
swarmed into the hall ; and here again the compelling power 
of the orator had to be invoked to quiet the tumult, which 
he did by ordering all the doors opened. We have this 
picture of Webster as he appeared on the occasion : — 

" Mr. Webster spoke in an orator's gown, and wore small- 
clothes. He was in the perfection of his manly beauty and 
strength ; his form filled out to its finest proportions, and his 
bearing, as he stood before the vast multitude, that ot absolute 
dignity and power. His manuscript lay on a small table near 
him, but he did not refer to it. His manner of speaking was 
deliberate and commanding. When he came to the passage 
on eloquence, and to the words, ' it is action, noble, sublime, 
godlike action,' he stamped his foot repeatedly on the stage, 
his form seemed to dilate, and he stood the personification of 
what he so perfectly described." 

As pure literature, some parts of this oration will probably 
survive as long as anything produced by Webster ; perhaps as 
long as the language in which they were spoken. In the inter- 
polated " sink or swim " speech, ascribed to John Adams on 
the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, so perfectly 
did Webster's genius reproduce the man and the occasion that 
it was long and persistently believed to be a speech actually 
delivered by Adams himself, — an impression which Webster 
twenty years later had not been able to correct. The 
Adams speech was an afterthought, written when the oration 
was substantially completed, on the morning before its deliv- 
ery. A friend who called on Webster found him pacing the 
room in excitement, his face wet with tears ; and to him 



II 



Webster repeated the speech, and asked his opinion upon it, 
saying that he had just written it, and was " uncertain whether 
it was the best or the worst part of the discourse." He was 
not left long in doubt. It is one of the most striking, and 
perhaps the most familiar, of all Webster's public utterances. 
What if such a voice had spoken to the men of the Revolu- 
tion in their own time ? 

These three great addresses passed at once into the na- 
tional literature. As productions of occasional oratory, they 
were never afterward equalled even by Webster himself; and 
they have held the first place against all others in the history 
of American eloquence. 

When Webster entered the Senate, in 1827, at the age of 
forty-five years, he was near the zenith of his fame. Hardly 
more than two years after he appeared there, the occasion arose 
which opened the way to his greatest public service and the 
crowning triumph of his life. A cloud arose out of the South 
that threatened the safety of the Union. Under the lead of 
Calhoun, it was proclaimed that the states are to judge of the 
extent of Federal power, with the right to resist it if ex- 
ceeded. This was nullification. It aroused no discussion in 
Congress until a year later, when an insignificant resolution 
touching the sale of public lands became the occasion of a 
debate which went to the foundations of the government. 
The discussion proceeded for some days without a word 
from Webster, until Hayne's attack on New England drew 
out a brief reply, in which Webster did little more than to 
repel what he regarded as an unwarrantable attempt to excite 
sectional feeling. Hayne returned to the assault in a brilliant, 
effective, and, as many thought, unanswerable speech, in 
which he made the fatal mistake of taunting Webster with 
trying to avoid Benton by selecting a weaker antagonist ; 
though the truth was that Webster, being engaged in the su- 
preme court, had not heard Benton's speech. This taunt 



12 



roused the lion. Webster was naturally lethargic, and his 
powers were never fully brought into action except under the 
strongest pressure; but he rarely overlooked a personal at- 
tack. He had a royal pride, that brooked no infringement 
of the prerogative. The caustic and not wholly groundless 
criticism of Hayne, at once upon New England and upon 
himself, stirred him to his depths ; and he seems then first 
to have awakened to the real importance of the occasion. 
Webster afterward declared this debate " a matter of acci- 
dent," and it may be that only the sting of Hayne's sar- 
casm brought him into the fray. On such trivial causes do 
great events sometimes turn. The situation was without 
precedent in the history of the country. An issue was fairly 
presented which involved the integrity, if not the existence, 
of the government. From contemporary accounts it would 
appear that the popular excitement, both north and south, 
was intense, and that Washington was full of distinguished 
visitors, attracted by the progress of the debate and the 
momentous importance of the consequences. Some pictures 
of the scene are probably overdrawn, though Webster after- 
ward said, " I never before spoke in the hearing of an audience 
so excited, so eager, and so sympathetic." The senate sat in 
the small chamber now occupied by the supreme court ; and 
the actual audience must have been limited to a few hundreds. 
But no space could measure and no walls confine the greatness 
of the occasion or the genius that availed of it. The breathless 
expectation, as Webster rose to speak, was answered with his 
first words. The famous exordium of the tempest-tossed 
mariner, is a masterly stroke of oratorical genius. He instantly 
riveted the attention of the eager assembly ; and after the 
opening note no doubt remained that the speaker was master 
of the occasion. He moved with conscious power from one 
position to another, in irresistible sequence, and with a force 
that swept all obstacles from his path ; and when he finished 



13 

there remained of the stronghold of nullification not one 
stone upon another. The integrity of the Union was at once 
and forever vindicated. 

The speech is known by heart. It is by universal consent 
the greatest example ot parliamentary eloquence in our his- 
tory, and the crowning achievement of Webster's genius in 
that field. It was more than a personal or political triumph. 
It rarely falls to the lot of an orator to see his speech take 
rank as a great national event, yet so it was with Webster. 
The reply to Hayne proved to be a turning-point in our 
history. It went home to the people with irresistible convic- 
tion. The national spirit awoke ; and the constitution stood 
upon its feet, a thing of life and power. In the supreme 
court, Marshall had already cemented the foundations of a 
permanent government. The reply to Hayne crowned the 
work, and left the Union indestructible. 

The notes from which Webster spoke were made, on a few 
sheets of paper, during the preceding night, when tradition 
says his anxious friends were hanging about him, alarmed bv 
his seeming indifference. But his whole life had been a 
preparation for this event, and he was serenely conscious of 
his power. To one who ventured to ask him whether he 
felt confident that he could answer Hayne, he rejoined: 
" Answer him ? I'll grind him finer than snuff." 

The great service which Webster rendered to the country 
in the reply to Hayne was consummated two years later, when 
Calhoun, a man of a very different order, put forth his utmost 
powers in a supreme effort to rehabilitate the right of nullifi- 
cation. It remained for Webster to unhorse the great cham- 
pion. No other could have entered the lists against him. 
The reply to Calhoun is probably the most powerful piece of 
reasoning in our parliamentary history. It is the apotheosis 
of pure argument. Without the warmth or color of the reply 
to Hayne, in force and precision of statement and logical 



14 

power it was never excelled ev^en by Webster himself. It was 
the conclusive and final answer to the claims of the South, 
and, as the course of history finally proved, left no appeal but 
to the sword. 

In the summer of 1830, but a few months after the great- 
est of Webster's parliamentary triumphs, he was called to ex- 
hibit another side of his manifold genius in his speech for the 
prosecution in the trial of Francis Knapp for the murder of 
Captain White, of Salem. This was not like the occasions of 
national importance to which he was accustomed. The scene 
was narrow and circumscribed, but in Webster's hands the 
subject took on a character greater than the occasion. The 
speech against Knapp is like the outlines of a great drama, 
having the human passions for its theme. The atrocity of 
the crime aroused an unparalleled excitement. The murder 
was projected by the Knapps, but was actually done by Crown- 
inshield, who had committed suicide while awaiting trial. 
Webster was brought into the prosecution to convince the 
jury, upon insufficient evidence, that Knapp was guilty as a 
principal in the murder. No power less than his would have 
been equal to the task. The first attempt failed, and Webster 
was then aroused to put forth all his strength. In the meagre 
report of his speech at the first trial are found only the germs 
of the mighty effort that finally swept the jury from its base. 
It is plain that in the interval the great mind of Webster 
smouldered with the tragedy, until it finally blazed up in this 
masterpiece of denunciatory eloquence. 

The dramatic power with which he reproduces the very 
spectacle of the murder is unsurpassed in forensic oratory : — 

" The circumstances now clearly in evidence spread out 
the whole scene before us. Deep sleep had fallen on the 
destined victim, and on all beneath his roof A healthful old 
man, to whom sleep was sweet, the first sound slumbers of 



IS 

the night held him in their soft but strong embrace. The 
assassin enters, through the window already prepared, into an 
unoccupied apartment. With noiseless foot he paces the 
lonely hall, half lighted by the moon. He winds up the ascent 
of the stairs, and reaches the door of the chamber. Of this he 
moves the lock, by soft and continued pressure, till it turns 
on its hinges. He enters, and beholds his victim before him. 
The room was uncommonlv open to the admission ot light. 
The face of the innocent sleeper was turned from the mur- 
derer ; and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of 
his aged temple, shewed him where to strike. The fatal blow 
is given ! and the victim passes, without a struggle or a motion, 
from the repose of sleep to the repose ot death. It is the 
assassin's purpose to make sure work ; and he yet plies the 
dagger, though it was obvious that life had been destroyed by 
the blow of the bludgeon. He even raises the aged arm, that 
he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again 
over the wounds of the poignard ! To finish the picture, he 
explores the wrist for the pulse : he feels it, and ascertains that 
it beats no longer. It is accomplished. The deed is done. 
He retreats, retraces his steps to the window, passes out 
through it, as he came in, and escapes. He has done the 
murder, — no eye has seen him, no ear has heard him. The 
secret is his own, and it is safe ! " 

It was necessary to satisfy thejury that Crowninshield was 
the murderer, Knapp being charged with aiding and abetting 
him ; and direct evidence that Crowninshield did the deed was 
wanting. Thereupon Webster, spurning argument from be- 
neath him, strips the veil from the suicide's soul, and laying it 
bare to the jury, by a lightning-flash of genius shows the 
guilt confessed. 

" The secret which the murderer possesses soon comes to 
possess him ; and, like the evil spirits of which we read, it 
overcomes him, and leads him whithersoever it will. He teels 
it beating at his heart, rising to his throat, and demanding dis- 
closure. He thinks the whole world sees it in his face, reads 



i6 

it in his eyes, and almost hears its workings in the very silence 
of his thoughts. It has become his master. It betrays his 
discretion, it breaks down his courage, it conquers his pru- 
dence. When suspicions from without begin to embarrass 
him, and the net of circumstance to entangle him, the fatal 
secret struggles with still greater violence to burst forth. It 
must be confessed, it will be confessed : there is no refuge 
from confession but suicide, — and suicide is confession." 

The speech concludes with a lofty appeal to the sense of 
duty, almost resembling the solemn grandeur of the Hebrew 
prophets. Rufus Choate, a competent critic, if a partial friend 
of the orator, declared this effort of Webster superior to the 
masterpiece of Demosthenes. Erskine, reckoned the most 
eloquent of English advocates, never approached it. As pure 
oratory, or as literature, it shows the high-water mark of 
Webster's genius. Among speeches to the jury, in elevation 
of thought and beauty and power of expression it stands alone. 
In dramatic intensity, in profound comprehension and search- 
ing analysis of the guilty human passions, it might have been 
conceived by the mind that produced Macbeth. 

With these two triumphs of eloquence, Webster's genius as 
an orator reached its meridian. He was then in his fort)^-ninth 
year. For twenty years longer there was no marked impair- 
ment of intellectual power, but the fervor of his eloquence was 
abated. There are occasional passages in the later speeches 
which approach his highest level. As a piece of imagery, 
nothing surpasses the magnificent figure of the power of 
England, in the speech of 1834 on President Jackson's pro- 
test. There are spirited passages in the speeches ot the late 
forties, against the Mexican war and the annexation ot Texas, 
as worthy of remembrance for their sentiments and expression 
as any utterance of his best days. He denounced " the plain, 
absolute unconstitutionality and illegality of the attempt of the 
Executive to enact laws bv executive authority in conquered 



17 

territories out of the United States," declaring that the power 
of the president to do this thing depends only on the ques- 
tion, " Does he wear a crown ? " He warned the people 
against the conquest of foreign possessions, poured contempt 
upon " manifest destiny," and vigorously denounced the 
" slavish doctrine," as he called it, that Congress should 
suffer a war policy to be forced upon it by acts of the Execu- 
tive. For this the war party stigmatized him as a " Mexi- 
can." " Names do not terrify me," retorted Webster. Some 
passages of the Capitol oration of 1851 are worthy of the 
orator of Plymouth and Bunker Hill. Either of the later 
speeches would have made the reputation of any other man ; 
but there is none which, as a whole, can be compared with 
the splendid productions of the earlier period. Webster was 
no longer young. Toward the end of his life, domestic 
calamity and the disappointment of his political hopes told 
visibly upon his health and spirits. As early as 1844 he 
said, " I am tired of public speaking, and am bringing it to a 
close." After that day of ill-omen, the 7th of March, 1850, 
before which every friend of Webster's memory would draw 
the veil, the man and the orator were changed. The tran- 
scendent genius passed into eclipse. From this time, though 
he spoke much and eagerly in the attempt to stay the tide of 
censure now running heavily against him, his tongue drips gall 
and wormwood, and his style is disfigured by unaccustomed 
arrogance and vituperation. The 7th of March speech is a 
great example of intellectual power, but it is not the Webster 
who fronted nullification in 1830. Devoted as he was to the 
Union, Webster must have seen and felt that the compro- 
mise of 1850 was an unnatural truce, between elements of 
irresistible repugnance, a mixture of fire and nitre, bound to 
destroy itself if not the Union which it was designed to save. 
Looking at the 7th of March speech as an example of 
oratory, apart from its political character, it is plain, while 



i8 

Webster's intellect responded to the call, that the vital spark 
did not kindle within him. 

Webster's personal character was a singular mixture of 
strength and weakness. His celestial fire tempered very com- 
mon clay. He had a generous nature, and loved his family, 
kindred and friends with a great affection. His heart melted 
and poured itself out in passionate grief at the death of wife 
and children. Yet he was a " good hater," and cherished deep 
and lasting resentments: — 

" Lofty and sour to them that loved him not, 
But, to those men that sought him, sweet as summer." 

He chafed under the labors and restraints of public life, al- 
ways longing to get back to the quiet seclusion of his seaside 
home at Marshfield. He was an enthusiastic farmer and 
a keen sportsman, alike with rod and gun. Rural pursuits 
were his delight, sweeter to him than professional triumphs or 
public distinctions, which he found empty of satisfaction. Al- 
most in his last year he said : " I have spent my life in law and 
politics. Law is uncertain, and politics utterly vain." His 
heart was out of doors, with nature, with the companions of 
his rural sports and pursuits, his farmers, his fishermen, his 
oxen and horses, always the special objects of his affection. 
He had the abounding animal spirits which go to the natural 
equipment of the orator. He was full of humor, and when 
alone with his family or friends, sportive and even frolicsome. 
He was an early riser ; and one of his commonest antics was 
to go through the house at daybreak, arousing the inmates 
with his shouting. This great character was even known to 
indulge his exuberance of spirits by capering and dancing 
about the room. He sang at his work. Without much ear 
for music, he was very fond of this diversion, and after an un- 
usually discordant outburst would say, with his gravest expres- 
sion, "If there is any one thing I fully understand, it is sing- 



19 

ing." His open-handed generosity betrayed him into the 
faults which often hang upon that virtue. He was profuse in 
hospitahty, lavish in expenditure, scattering money with both 
hands when he had it, and borrowing more readily than he 
repaid. The people demanded the services which otherwise 
would have been rewarded with the largest professional income 
of his time ; and he allowed this sacrifice to be partly recom- 
pensed by contributions of bankers and merchants, his con- 
stituents, friends, and admirers. To become the pensioner 
of men whose interests might be affected by his public action 
was an error which brought censure upon him in his own 
time and has permanently marred his reputation. Yet there 
is no reason to believe that it ever affected his public conduct. 
Not only was he superior to such influences, but the very 
faults of his character were a defence against them. This 
great man was singularly insensible to money obligations. 
Toward the end of his life he felt the longing to be free of 
debt. It is pathetic to see him, in his seventieth and last 
year, overtasking his strength to undertake a difficult case, in 
a distant city, under temptation of a large fee, and anxiously 
calculating with a friend whether life and health enough re- 
mained to enable him, by earning a few more such fees, to die, 
as he said, " a free man." The hope was never realized. 

Nature moulded Webster for a great orator. His physi- 
cal endowments were superb. A stately and commanding 
figure, crowned by a great leonine head ; an " amorphous crag- 
like face," as Carlyle called it ; a lofty brow towering above 
the craters of his cavernous eyes ; an aspect changing under 
the play of emotion from smiles of irresistible sweetness, re- 
vealing teeth " white as a hound's," to a portentous darkness 
which seemed to shade the landscape ; a rich and resonant 
voice, of great variety and compass, — united to make 

" A combination, and a form, indeed, 
Where every god did seem to set his seal." 



20 



He was superior to ridicule, and caricature rarely tried its 
hand upon him. Nothing like the impression which he made 
on all about him is known to our generation. Power seemed 
to radiate from him. He was called " the godlike Daniel," 
and so he appeared. " Webster must be a charlatan," said an 
eminent Englishman who met him in 1839 : "no man can be 
so great as he looks." In his presence other men stood mute, 
as though under a spell. In London, where he was person- 
ally unknown, the people turned to look after him in the 
streets, as they always did at home. He seemed to tower 
with the front of Jove; and yet the godlike Daniel was con- 
siderably under six feet in height, and it is said that he never 
weighed two hundred pounds. The majesty of his figure and 
presence was no illusion, but it was not in his physical stature. 
The power that moved men was within him. 

Great orators, more than any other men except great 
soldiers, have always commanded the public admiration. To 
the genius that plays upon the human feelings and passions 
by the power of speech, the nature of man never fails to re- 
spond. The orator brings the people face to face with the 
living embodiment of genius; the highest combination of the 
power of thought with the power of action. The magnetism 
of a commanding figure, animated with conceptions breaking 
into eloquent expression, takes hold irresistibly upon the im- 
agination and the passions, moving even dull and stolid men 
to excitement and action, as the harp of Orpheus moved the 
beasts and the rocks. In a popular government, always in- 
fluenced and sometimes controlled by public speech, eloquence 
is a direct source of political power, often elevating to high 
places men who have no other title to popular favor. Under 
the orator's spell, men often follow him blindly, with unrea- 
soning personal devotion. No man of his time except Clay 
had more of this following than Webster. Yet the current of 
popular admiration did not carry either of these great men into 



21 



the presidency, the haven of his hopes. One reason, among 
many, is that the public confidence does not always follow the 
public applause. 

In assigning to Webster his rank among the great orators 
of the world, he has been compared with Cicero and Demos- 
thenes, with Burke, Chatham, Fox, and Erskine, and with all 
the great Americans. Among Webster's contemporaries, 
none but Clay and Calhoun in the senate, and Pinkney and 
Choate at the bar, can be classed with him. Clay's power to 
sway a popular audience was probably greater than Webster's, 
but most of his oratory perished with the occasion. His 
greatest speeches are now unread, and likely soon to be for- 
gotten. Calhoun approached Webster only in reasoning 
power, and his acute and subtle logic often vanished into 
profitless abstractions that came to nothing. He sincerely 
devoted the best of his life to a pernicious theory of our 
government, which was refuted by Webster in debate and 
finally perished by the sword. His only legacy to his coun- 
try was one of misfortune and disaster. Pinkney, who gave 
place to Webster as the first orator at the bar, has no title 
to be compared with him in genius. He left little permanent 
impression upon our law, and none upon our politics or litera- 
ture. Choate was oriental, a child of the sun. In richness 
of fancy and wealth of ornament there is no other like him. 
He seemed to possess a supernatural power of fascination, 
but the swarming exuberance of his Asiatic imagination im- 
paired the effect justly due to his great powers. In Choate's 
style is the gorgeous beauty of a tropical garden, in Webster's 
the simple dignity and massive strength of the oak. Splen- 
did as Choate's greatest addresses are, they have never taken 
hold upon the public, nor found a permanent place in litera- 
ture. The polished elegance of Everett, the consuming fire 
of Wendell Phillips, the unerring logic and prophetic forecast 
of Lincoln's speeches of 1858, are among the highest ex- 



22 



amples of American oratory ; and there are a few scenes in 
our history — Washington resigning command of the army, 
Lincoln at Gettysburg — where the grandeur of the occasion 
contributed to raise human speech to the level of the sublime. 
Leaving these inspired utterances apart, Webster must be 
awarded the first place among American orators. 

Of the Englishmen, Fox was the great debater ; but his 
speeches, as he said, are not readable, and they were not 
usually convincing. Chatham survives only in a few great 
and brilliant fragments. Burke was much more than an 
orator. His imperial genius ranged over the whole domain 
of politics, philosophy, and letters. " Out of Burke," said 
Choate, in one of his characteristic bursts of playful extrava- 
gance, "might be cut 50 Mclntoshes, 175 Macaulays, 40 
Jeffreys, 250 Sir Robert Peels, and leave him greater than Pitt 
and Fox together." Macaulay accounted him, in breadth of 
comprehension and richness of imagination, the first orator of 
the world, and declared the Nabob speech to be "unmatched 
in the literature of eloquence." Yet Burke was not greatest 
as an orator. The best of his speeches are splendid essays. 
With a vaster breadth of intellect and depth of moral power 
than Webster, before an audience he was often theatrical and 
declamatory, and usually inefi^ective. If Webster could not 
have made Burke's greatest speech, it is not because it was 
beyond his powers, but because he was incapable of its faults. 
In oratory, Burke cannot be held his superior. 

No just or instructive parallel can be drawn between 
Webster's oratory and that of the Greeks or Romans. For 
such a comparison there must be a similarity of conditions. 
We cannot conceive what Webster might have been in 
the Areopagus, or Cicero before the American senate. 
Oratory takes its character from the genius of the race which 
produces it. Every orator Is the product of his own times. 
The style and standards of public speech are constantly 

L.cfC. 



23 

changing, even among the same people. That which makes 
a profound impression on one generation may be lightly re- 
garded by the next. The actual effectiveness of oratory, as 
the art of persuasion by speech, is a principal test of its merit. 
Enduring beauty of form is another. Webster actually accom- 
plished more for his country by his powers ot speech than 
Cicero for Rome, or Demosthenes for Athens. As literature, 
his greatest productions are not less worthy than theirs to 
stand as models of eloquence. But these comparisons, if just, 
are of little value. It is idle to weigh one great genius in the 
balance against another : they differ as one star differeth from 
another star in glory. 

Perhaps the most remarkable quality of Webster's oratory, 
in view of its volume and variety, is its uniform purity of 
style. He was before the Congress, the courts, and the 
people for twoscore years. He usually spoke under circum- 
stances not admitting of previous composition ; and his style, 
at least, was extemporaneous. He was not so tar superior to 
others as to be always at his best : there is proof enough that 
on occasions he was heavy and disappointed his audience. 
But he was never trivial, never involved or obscure, hardly 
ever commonplace. He was accustomed to deal with issues 
that did not admit of trifling; and his unerring taste, one 
element of his genius, instinctively rejected everything beneath 
the level of the subject or the occasion. Some of his speeches 
betray a fondness for Latin quotation, possibly accounted for 
by a letter to his son, in which he says : " If a man can grace- 
fully and without the air of a pedant show a little more 
knowledge than the occasion requires, the world will give him 
credit for eminent attainments. It is an honest quackery. I 
have practised it, sometimes with success." No man of his 
time was more engaged in controversy, often under circum- 
stances of great excitement ; but he never forgot the decorum 
of debate, and when he unbent his accustomed dignity, which 



24 

was not often, he rarely gave offence or betrayed any weakness 
in his argument. One or two examples will show the 
extreme limit of his departures from the " superb propriety " 
which characterized him. In the debate of 1838 on the sub- 
treasury, to Calhoun, when he threatened to " carry the war 
into Africa," Webster retorted : " As 1 recollect it, when 
Scipio resolved upon carrying the war into Africa, Hannibal 
was not at home. Now, sir, I am very little like Hannibal, 
but I am at home ; and when Scipio Africanus South Caro- 
liniensis brings the war into my territories, I shall not leave 
their defence to Asdruhal, nor Syphax, nor anybody else. 1 
meet him on the shore at his landing, and propose but one 
contest." To his Marshfield neighbors in 1848 he said, of 
the New England politicians who had abandoned Van Buren 
to support Polk : " I think that ' doughface ' is an epithet not 
sufficiently reproachfiil. Such persons are doughfaces, with 
dough heads and dough hearts and dough souls. They are 
all dough ; the coarsest potter may mould them to vessels of 
dishonor." He had a lofty and caustic satire, sharply edged 
with humor ; and he well understood that no weapon in the 
armory of speech is more deadly than ridicule, judiciously 
employed. The reply to Hayne bears witness of this. Per- 
haps the bursts of patriotic eloquence in that great speech were 
not more effective in carrying the country than the exquisite 
badinage of the parley before the Charleston custom-house. 
At one stroke, it turned the champion and the cause of nullifi- 
cation into inextinguishable laughter. 

On common occasions Webster was unimpassioned, but 
never empty. His words always had weight and meaning. 
Under inspiration of a great theme, he rose to a grandeur of 
diction and imagery that moves like the verse of Milton. Jn 
the excitement of debate, he trampled down all obstacles 
" like a mammoth in a cane-brake." On the critical and 
momentous occasions that broke up the fountains of the great 



25 

deep within him, there is in his speech a massing of forces, 
an irresistible weight of advance, an overwhelming rush and 
sweep of assault, that stirs the blood like the movement of an 
embattled host. Such an occasion was the reply to Hayne, 
when words were deeds, eloquence rose to the dignity of action, 
and history turned upon the event of a single speech. 

A just estimate of Webster must regard not only the form, 
but the amount and varied character, of his oratory and the 
effects which it produced. For style, compass, variety, and 
achievement, taken together, Webster stands alone. In each 
of the principal fields of eloquence, forensic, parliamentary, 
and occasional or popular, his supremacy is without dispute. 
He is almost the onlv example of an orator who invaded and 
conquered every province of the art, and in none is his 
style corrupted or his force impaired by the habits of an- 
other. His speeches to the court or jury are the perfection 
of advocacy. There is no declamation, no excess of orna- 
ment, no appeal to passion, nothing but the "clearness, force, 
and earnestness " which he declared to be the qualities that 
produce conviction, blended with an eloquence that burns 
only to illuminate the argument. The combination made him 
well-nigh irresistible. " Whom shall I retain against Web- 
ster ? " asked an anxious litigant who had been too late to 
secure him. " Send to South America," was the reply, "and 
import an earthquake." His congressional speeches are dis- 
tinguished by breadth of view, a luminous clearness of state- 
ment and persuasive force, and an intellectual supremacy, en- 
titling them to the highest place among the great examples of 
parliamentary eloquence. Before a popular or occasional as- 
sembly he was as though he had never addressed any other. 
No trace of the lawyer or parliamentarian is betrayed in the 
simple directness with which he spoke to an audience of his 
fellow-citizens, or in the lofty and impassioned eloquence 
commemorating some great national event, which itself be- 
came an event of national significance. 



26 

Webster's greatest speeches have the indefinable quality of 
permanence. It is not easy to resolve the genius of oratory 
into its elements, or to say, of two examples which make an 
equal impression at the moment, why one survives while the 
other is forgotten. " He is an orator," said Webster, "who 
can make me think as he thinks and feel as he feels." This 
is persuasion, the first aim of oratory ; but this is not the true 
aseptic that keeps it alive. Some of the most effective speeches 
at the moment are wholly unfit for the cold immortality of 
print, and have no lasting merit as literature. For the best 
portrayal of the eloquence that endures, we must again turn to 
Webster himself: — 

" True eloquence does not consist in speech. It can- 
not be brought from far. Labor and learning may toil for it, 
but they will toil in vain. Words and phrases may be mar- 
shalled in everv way, but they cannot compass it. It must 
exist in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion. Affected 
passion, intense expression, the pomp of declamation, all may 
aspire to it : they cannot reach it. It comes, if it come at all, 
like the outbreaking of a fountain from the earth, or the 
bursting forth of volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, 
native force." 

Such was the eloquence of Webster. Opportunity favored 
him, no less than nature. He brought to the great issues 
and great occasions with which he had to deal a genius which 
has made his speeches classic among his countymen, and fit to 
be read and remembered wherever homage is paid to the great 
masters of speech. 

It is easy to fall into the error of overestimating a public 
character. No vice is more common, or more unworthy ot 
intelligent minds, than indiscriminate eulogy. The eager 
crowd sets up idols of clav, and awards immortality to person- 
ages who will be forgotten by the next generation ; unmind- 
ful that there is no title to permanent fame except in great 



27 

public services to a nation, a race, or to mankind. Can Web- 
ster's claim be submitted to thiis test ? The highest rank in 
oratory must be awarded to that which draws after it the greatest 
and most lasting results. A speech, however admirable in 
form, that reaches no farther than the next verdict, or the next 
election, cannot be classed with the great utterances that settle 
a principle of government or direct the thought of a nation. 
Viewed in the light of what he actually accomplished by the 
power of eloquence, Webster may be accounted first among 
the great orators of history. It may be that the Union stands 
to-day a monument to his compelling genius. He devoted 
the best of his life and his transcendent powers to nationalize 
the people of the states. In his inmost soul he believed that 
the mighty experiment of free institutions was staked upon 
the perpetuity of the American Union. The theme took pos- 
session of him. He proclaimed the destiny of a great and 
united nation, devoting a continent to civil and religious free- 
dom, and leading the way to the universal emancipation of 
mankind, in words that burned into the hearts of his country- 
men, until a barren political conception became a living reality, 
and the Union stood personified as the embodiment of all 
their hopes and aspirations. He inspired them with his own 
faith ; and, long after he had mouldered into dust, it was to 
his step that they marched in defence of the Union, and his 
faith that they sealed with their blood. 

No monuments of the language or literature of a race are 
more likely to survive than the utterances of its great orators. 
From the wreck of ancient states there have come down to us 
a few masterpieces of eloquence. Their matchless beauty and 
perfection of style is the admiration of scholars, but we look 
to them in vain for the creative energy that inspires great and 
momentous events. If such as these have survived for twenty 
centuries, what remains for the orator who touched the hearts 
of millions to the issue of nationality ? At a distance of but 



28 

fifty years from Webster's death, it is not yet time to assign 
iiis permanent place in the remembrance of mankind, or pre- 
dict for him an immortality rarely achieved and rarely mer- 
ited in this world. Yet there is something in the inspired 
utterances of patriotism and eloquence that prevails over 
time ; and if imagination may forecast the distant age when 
new dynasties have circled the earth, when our history 
moulders in libraries, and even our language is merged in a 
universal tongue, the curious antiquary, exploring the remains 
of an extinct literature for the origin and genius of free institu- 
tions, may catch a glimpse of this majestic figure outlined 
against the background of the centuries, and an echo of the 
voice that rallied a nation to the call of " Liberty and Union, 
one and inseparable." 



API 15 1903 



